EyezOn Forum

digitalarch wrote:The excuse of excessive messages is no longer valid. They fixed that issue after it occurred when a number of us offered suggestions on how to solve the problem. That is why the zone followers only send out email alerts every 5-10 minutes so that any excessive flooding gets blocked in between the 1 message per time rule. I think at first they had it at 10 minutes, then they found a way to improve their algorithm even more so reduced it to 5 minutes.

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Considering flooding is no longer a problem since they have a way to mitigate that issue, restricting it to 1 is very limiting. People use these for many different reasons. The basic plan should offer the ability to use more than 1 zone follower,even if it isn't set to unlimited like the premium plan.

This is completely false. I was at a meeting in October of 2012 where it shown that of 2430 events that happened in a sample minute, 1900 where idle zone followers. All generated by the 8% of users that actually use this feature. The mail system admins where playing a never-ending game of "whack-a-mole" trying to keep legitimate Envisalerts from being block by ISP spam engines. That is why we changed the rules to limit to 1 zone per Envisalink. In 2013, Zone Follower traffic accounted for about 20% of all Envisalerts.

As there have been absolutely zero complaints about this policy in 18 months (other than the issue raised in this thread) there has not been an internal discussion about increasing this number. And to further push this point, we've received only 3 tech-support calls regarding the database switchover last week.

GrandWizard wrote: ... I was at a meeting in October of 2012 where it shown that of 2430 events that happened in a sample minute, 1900 where idle zone followers. All generated by the 8% of users that actually use this feature. The mail system admins where playing a never-ending game of "whack-a-mole" trying to keep legitimate Envisalerts from being block by ISP spam engines. That is why we changed the rules to limit to 1 zone per Envisalink. In 2013, Zone Follower traffic accounted for about 20% of all Envisalerts.

It's clearly understood that you experienced a flood of traffic before your October 2012 meeting, but you fixed that problem with the elegant throttling algorithm you announced in November 2012, which was praised by me and others in this thread when you announced it - http://forum.eyez-on.com/FORUM/viewtopi ... b011c838ed

It's hard to imagine there was a traffic flood problem after your November 2012 solution. If there was, it seems like some algorithm tweaking could solve it or a prepaid per message fee as I described in my last post above.

Multiple followers was one of the features that attracted me to buy a 2DS and a 3-year subscription to your monitoring service. Early adopters are often courted with features that are later re-categorized from free features to premium-priced features, however a good practice would be to grandfather those early adopters.

Bill D wrote:It's clearly understood that you experienced a flood of traffic before your October 2012 meeting, but you fixed that problem with the elegant throttling algorithm you announced in November 2012, which was praised by me and others in this thread when you announced it - http://forum.eyez-on.com/FORUM/viewtopi ... 788e6dcdd7

It's hard to imagine there was a traffic flood problem after your November 2012 solution. If there was, it seems like some algorithm tweaking could solve it or a prepaid per message fee as I described in my last post above.

Multiple followers was one of the features that attracted me to buy a 2DS and a 3-year subscription to your monitoring service. Early adopters are often courted with features that are later re-categorized from free features to premium-priced features, however a good practice would be to grandfather those early adopters.

Exactly. My point below was the the throttling algorithm should have taken care of the issue. If it was such a huge problem then they wouldn't be offering an option with unlimited zone followers at all. I also agree the us early adopters that have been using these features since 2012 and just had them taken away should be grandfathered. When we signed up for the service there was no 1 zone follower policy and we expected to be able to use the service as it was. If new people joining are told about the 1 zone policy, that is fine, but something that we have been relying on and was available shouldn't be taken away, especially when throttling was put in place.

GrandWizard, you may have not had a lot of tech support calls yet because no announcement was made, no email was sent to customers that this database change was happening and people might not even know they lost their service. Since many of us have zone followers that do not trigger very often, it may be some time before people notice their service is now gone. Whether the official policy was meant to be 1 zone follower or not, it is very bad practice as a business to remove/disable features on users without even notifying them, especially when those users are relying on those notifications for important or critical zones. There are probably people with gun safes that had a zone follower that will never get their notification because they were set back to "none" when the database switch over happened. The company needs to be much more proactive about communication with customers when critical changes will affect them.

You Gentlemen misunderstand, or maybe I'm not clear. Prior to thottling, zone followers constituted 99% of alert traffic and took down our servers multiple times. That is why we had to take down the service altogther until a solution was found. Throttling at first made things managable (50% or so) but quickly rose again as subscribers rose. People were still making every zone a zone follower even though they were told not to. We had to limit zone followers to one zone at that time.

As for notifying people of a change, we weren't aware that any subscribers had more than one zone followed. We can't drill that deep into customer reports to see that.

As far as we can tell only a handful of customers had access to multiple zone followers and I'm sorry you had this all this time but we cannot allow some customers to have access multiple zone followers when everyone else can't. This is akin to people getting free cable for years and then having the service cut off.

I will forward a request to look at whether more than one zone can be allowed but as I said, there hasn't been a single request to add more than one zone follower other forum users on this thread.

If you want to log all your zone traffic then I recommend you use the built-in TPI and log it on your local computer.

GrandWizard wrote:You Gentlemen misunderstand, or maybe I'm not clear. Prior to thottling, zone followers constituted 99% of alert traffic and took down our servers multiple times. That is why we had to take down the service altogther until a solution was found. Throttling at first made things managable (50% or so) but quickly rose again as subscribers rose. People were still making every zone a zone follower even though they were told not to. We had to limit zone followers to one zone at that time.

My point is that when we signed up and paid for the service we were allowed multiple zones, and then you apparently changed the policy to 1 which I wasn't even aware of because I continued to have support for more than 1 which is what I had signed up for and paid for in the beginning.

GrandWizard wrote:As for notifying people of a change, we weren't aware that any subscribers had more than one zone followed. We can't drill that deep into customer reports to see that.

That seems to be another problem in itself if you can't tell what customers have which features so that modifying things breaks stuff you aren't even aware of for customers.

GrandWizard wrote:As far as we can tell only a handful of customers had access to multiple zone followers and I'm sorry you had this all this time but we cannot allow some customers to have access multiple zone followers when everyone else can't. This is akin to people getting free cable for years and then having the service cut off.

No, actually it is akin to people signing up to get 50 channels of cable and then having the policy changed to 1 channel because their infrastructure couldn't handle the success/load but those customers continuing to get the 50 channels that they originally signed up for, then having service cut off out of the blue and wondering what happened since they had signed up for 50 channels in the first place. It is not like we signed up for 1 channel and then sudden got 50 for free, I signed up to be able to have multiple zone followers which I was given when I paid for service only to have it taken away later even though I had already paid.

GrandWizard wrote:I will forward a request to look at whether more than one zone can be allowed but as I said, there hasn't been a single request to add more than one zone follower other forum users on this thread.

That would be most appreciated. I don't need access to 50 zones, but more than 1 would be very useful. Even if it was limited to 5. Further restrictions could be placed on people's zone follower queue for basic accounts if people are worried about traffic such as no more than 10 alerts for all zones combined per hour, or a max # messages per day, or something like that. For people who try to abuse the system will be limited, and for those of us who find it very useful and have periodic events don't need to be punished. Or heck, even having 1 by default but then you can click a button to enable more but you have to agree to terms saying if you generate too much traffic you will be pushed back down to a max of 1 or something to stop the abusers.

GrandWizard wrote:If you want to log all your zone traffic then I recommend you use the built-in TPI and log it on your local computer.

It is not logging that I'm interested in, it is more alerting when specific zones trip. I don't have all my zones enabled, but I do have more than 1 that I follow. And the traffic at my location is very low, most zones rarely trip but when they do it is important that I'm notified.

Jeff.

May I respectfully suggest that even a Grand Wizard sometimes misunderstands a problem.

One motion detector being followed could easily generate far more traffic in a week than I've generated in the 3 years that I've had my 7 zones followed (my average has been two messages per week).

You accurately say above: "alert traffic took down our servers multiple times" as opposed to saying "the large number of zones being followed took down our servers".

Since your only problem is traffic, then traffic is the only problem that you need to address.

There are many simple algorithms you could use to automatically reward well-behaved multi-follower users by giving us timely alerts, which automatically punish abusers by giving them delayed, aggregated or dropped alert messages.

Well, I guess this explains why my 5 zone followers stopped working the other day. Like you guys, it has been this way since I looked into buying this product a couple of years ago. The multiple zone followers and free email notification was the NUMBER ONE reason I bought this product and not others. I'm very disappointed in Eyez-On removing this feature for those that bought the product with the promise of such a feature. I guess I'm suppose to take some programming classes so I can write a program to use the TPI to replace a feature I bought and paid for when I bought my unit.

Very poor service, Eyez-ON, very poor!

telecomgeek wrote:Well, I guess this explains why my 5 zone followers stopped working the other day. Like you guys, it has been this way since I looked into buying this product a couple of years ago. The multiple zone followers and free email notification was the NUMBER ONE reason I bought this product and not others. I'm very disappointed in Eyez-On removing this feature for those that bought the product with the promise of such a feature. I guess I'm suppose to take some programming classes so I can write a program to use the TPI to replace a feature I bought and paid for when I bought my unit.

Very poor service, Eyez-ON, very poor!

For the benefit of the community, telecomgeek is not being truthful. He/she activated the Envisalink just over a year ago, long after the single zone policy was introduced. As well, Eyezon has never advertised zone followers as a feature.

I repeat, this:

I'd also suggest that it's one thing to ask for a premium payment for certain features. That's fair game. To roll back features people have already become accustomed to will only draw immense ire from the community at large, not bring in more revenue.

Although it's clear now that this wasn't a means to add more of the content to the premium service, the negative mood on this thread should illustrate the dangers of roll backs in general, even if they were accidental.

It's obvious people got free access to something they shouldn't, but now you're in a pickle. As busy as you guys are, I'd suggest revisiting the policy and coming up with a minor compromise. That would show an immense goodwill on the part of your company. I've dealt with you folks before, and I have to say you -are- good caring people. Still, it's clear that some people need your help to make the best of the otherwise fantastic service you provide.

When this feature was enabled, it was specifically stated that they would keep an eye on traffic and disable it if necessary:

http://forum.eyez-on.com/FORUM/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=180

We are going to evaluate network traffic to see how this feature impacts the servers. If we find it is too much we reserve the right to disable this feature on a per user basis. Please only use zone followers if you need them.

Then in 2012, it was stated that you were limited to 1 per system:

http://forum.eyez-on.com/FORUM/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=463

To keep this traffic manageable, and to allow Eyezon to continue providing our customers with complete system control and emergency alerts for FREE, we must limit zone followers to one (1) zone per system. Envisalerts+ subscribers are allowed to select multiple zones as part of their standard package.

I am using my zone follower to alert me if the temperature or humidity in my wine cellar goes out of range. That is something that is 24-hr Supervisory but won't sound my bell.